AI adds to employee workload, study finds

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being widely adopted in workplaces, but employees say they are not easing workloads as promised. According to reports from Amazon corporate employees and a survey by workforce analytics company ActivTrak, AI is often making tasks longer rather than faster.

The Guardian reported that Amazon staff said the company’s push for all employees to use “half-baked” AI tools added to their workload.

“I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us that much faster,” a software developer at Amazon told The Guardian. “But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.”

The ActivTrak survey covered 163,638 employees in 1,111 organisations over a period of three years. The conclusion was clear: AI does not alleviate workloads. More time is spent on each work category.

Email usage increased by 104%, whereas chat and messaging usage increased by 145%. Time spent on business management tools increased by 94%. The report concluded that “AI is being used as an additional productivity layer, not a substitute for existing work.”

The gap between the promise and the reality is not unique to Amazon. In a podcast by Google, former executive Mo Gawdat discussed that technology often works by increasing human capabilities and societal values rather than decreasing them.

According to Gawdat, the need for productivity in a capitalist world means that technology has the chance to create more work rather than decreasing it. Experts believe that though technology has the chance to increase productivity by using AI, it also has the chance to create more work for the employee. This raises a question about the true benefits of technology for the workplace.